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The Role of Culture Making and Memory in the Civic Society Culture gives us different values for our memories. Most enculturization come through story. Stories of how to behave, stories of overcoming obstacles, stories of exceptional courage and sacrifice, and cowardly denial and selfishness. We process the stories against our own memories of actions and observations, and we accept or reject these stories as relevent to our particular lives. Many, many people in the world have spent the last century in a conscious effort to examine how story makes us human. We have accepted that oral transmission has been and remains our principal form of cultural exchange as a species, while also gaining a better understanding how mediated culture, printed or electronic, has greatly effected the way we use and rely on our oral cultural transactions. In twentieth century societies, numerous artistic movements developed drawing on aesthetic principles that celebrated the creative expression of "common folk"-that is, the creativity of the non-professional artist. Those aesthetics were manifested in an art of social commitment, an art of public education, an art of theraputic recovery, an art of memorialization of the common victim of historical/social tragedies among many others. Oral history, art therapy, community spectacle, multicultural arts-in-education activism, arts practice as community economic development, are all examples of how these aesthetics have evolved. In the U.S., these approaches come under many names, but for the sake of this essay, we will refer to these art processes as community arts. Shared by all of these artistic practices is the central value of personal experience and memory. Artists adapted the organizing principle of countless varieties of psychological, cultural identity and social change movements, which had demonstated that the reciting and coming to terms with one's own past, you build "self esteem" or "personal empowerment." For the contemporary social activist, personal enpowerment and emotional recovery becomes the basis of a larger civic project of social change and the basis for self-determination of a community's, or large sections of the societies, political and economic future.
The community arts aesthetic has been described in the arts community as "cultural grounding." Where dominant cultural expression takes people away from the real issues in their lives, community artists seek to "ground" people in the truths of their existance. Those truths, that is the many ways our memories serve up a pattern of meaning that fits with our experience, are often expressed as story. What makes the new approaches to "cultural grounding" so critical in the current historical moment is that the forms of social interaction that helped define identity, the family, the clan, the village, the nation-state; are all being undermined by global economics. One reaction has been fundamentalism, which treats memory selectively and statically within the security of dogma. On the other side, is the recitation of new stories of identity, stories that help us to come to terms with living in the flux of multiple identities, by allowing us to find new commonalities/community out of our sense of common values. The community arts aesthetic is a critical process to assist this larger project of civic reconstruction in a post-colonial world.
Joe Lambert is Director of the San Francisco Digital Media Center
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